de Martin Guerre (1982), a fictionalized account of a sixteenth-century peasant who left his village and had his identity assumed there by an imposter, Davis wrote the historical novel The Return of Martin Guerre, in which she attempts to fill in some of the gaps in the film version and to treat the story more as history than as fictional narrative. In 1987, she produced Fiction in the Archives, a collection of sixteenth-century letters written by convicted criminals in France hoping to have their sentences commuted. Davis adds her own commentary on the social and political significance of the letters, and analyzes differences in the style and content of letters written by women as opposed to those written by men. Women on the Margins (1995), tells the stories of three seventeenth-century women: a Jewish businesswoman in Germany, a Catholic missionary who co-founded a convent in Quebec, and a Protestant text illustrator in the Dutch colony of Suriname. In Davis's Slaves on Screen (2000), she returns to her interest in cinema; the work covers the representation of slaves in such popular films as Spartacus,Amistad, and Beloved. Also published in 2000, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France is a study of the social and cultural meanings behind the exchange of gifts.

Critical Reception

Because Davis's work appeals to historians as well as the general public, her books are often reviewed in both scholarly journals and popular periodicals. Assessments of her work are mixed. Many fellow historians have praised her innovative work in the field of social history, including her treatment of the lives of ordinary citizens, or “history from below,” as it is sometimes called. Charmarie Jenkins Blaisdell commends Davis for giving voice to the men and women affected by the social and political changes taking place in the early modern world, people “who have been largely ignored because they left practically nothing in writing.” Richard Cobb, however, believes that in Davis's work “the people themselves are generally assigned a somewhat peripheral part, the author frequently intervening to interpret their thoughts, aspirations and actions for them, as though they could not always be trusted to speak for themselves.” Similar controversies surround The Return of Martin Guerre, with reviewer Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie praising it as a “major work of historical reconstruction,” and Robert Finlay contending that parts of the work appear to be “far more a product of invention than of historical reconstruction” particularly the character of Martin's wife, whom Davis turns into “a sort of proto-feminist of peasant culture.” While several scholars accuse Davis of excessive fictionalizing in her work, Jonathan Dewald maintains that the author “has sought to restore our direct contact with voices from the sixteenth century” and commends her collection of letters of remission, Fiction in the Archives, for accomplishing that purpose. The fiction to which the title refers exists within the letters themselves as petitioners tried to state their cases in the most favorable way possible. Addressing Davis's “innovative methodology,” Nancy L. Roelker explains that it consists of “finding linkages that others have overlooked, combining sociological, political, and legal aspects of history with literary analysis and psychological insights.”

Women on the Margins, while well received, also generated critical debate. Many critics, such as Anne Jacobson Schutte, praise the work for its eloquent treatment of the lives of three very different women, calling it “a marvelous read” for both scholars and the general public. Schutte expresses reservations, however, about Davis's treatment of one of her subject's relationship with the indigenous population of Suriname. Endowing the woman with “an unusually sympathetic view of indigenes in the Dutch colony strikes this reader as forcing possibilities beyond the margins of plausibility,” claims Schutte. Patricia Seed contends that since two of Davis's three subjects took part in the colonization of the Americas, their status as “women on the margins” must be viewed in relative terms. As white Europeans, these women were far more powerful than their counterparts among the indigenous population, contends Seed. Reviewers of The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, draw attention to Davis's blurring of the usual distinctions between academic disciplines. Keith Thomas, for example, reports that “by applying anthropological theories of the gift to the understanding of history, Davis has illuminated the texture of social and personal relationships in sixteenth-century France.” Of her career as a whole, Peter N. Miller maintains that Davis “has been one of the most innovative historians working in North America in the past four decades. Without any self-promoting fanfare, Davis's works have set many of the fashions now followed by other historians.”